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So Bob Dylan went and made himself a Christmas album, instead of a holiday album. It ends with him singing “amen” at the end of a non-ironic “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Many will note that the album does not contain a performance, ironic or otherwise, of “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel.”
As the Divine Ms. MZ mentioned the other day in her “Nightmare on Capitol Hill” post, abortion is the issue that simply will not die in the ongoing debates about health-care reform. Right to life issues also hover in the background in those arguments about care of the elderly, too.
I know that I do, especially when I am trying to read about a subject that (a) the mainstream press doesn’t care that much about and (b) hot-headed partisans in the media care too much about. Thus, you get these short incomplete reports about subjects that “aren’t really news,” only that to some people the events are symbolic and, thus, transcend news (so they tend to scream about them at advocacy sites online).
There is much to praised in the “60 Minutes” profile of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and his tiny, yet historically significant, flock of persecuted Orthodox Christians in Istanbul. It’s worth watching, if only for the remarkable videos taken at St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai in Egypt and the remarkable city of churches and monastic cells carved into the mountain cliffs in Cappadocia (video link here) in Eastern Turkey.
The first time I saw Archbishop Job of the Orthodox Church in America, he was singing the simple, yet haunting, hymn that the Orthodox sing during funerals — Memory Eternal.
I have a friend who grew up in Japan and, a decade of so ago, he took me over for a week to speak to several gatherings of Christian missionaries with years of experience in that unique cultural environment.
It would be impossible not to be moved by USA Today feature story about the volunteers at Santa-America, who swing into action this time of year in 40 states to minister to children who are living in hospice care or those who face the lose of a parent.
Obviously, one of the major religion stories of the day is the death of the Rev. Oral Roberts at the age of 91. I would imagine that the major newspapers have had obituaries ready for a decade or more.
Several GetReligion readers have sent in the URL for a Washington Post story that ran last weekend about the formation of a group for gays, lesbians and, one would assume, bisexuals on the campus of the Catholic University of America.
