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So I was driving through this astonishing Appalachian thunderstorm last night, punching the radio over and over trying to get weather information, when the tuner hit a strong signal and I heard something really bizarre coming out of the car speakers.
You may have heard, already, that the Rev. Billy Graham joined millions of other Americans by eating a symbolic Chick-fil-A sandwich on Wednesday.
At the moment, I am up in the mountains of North Carolina, which is one of those places where the occasional Democrat running for higher office will go out of his or her way to put the word “conservative” on the campaign yard signs so that they can try to hang on to the remnant of the good old days down here in the Bible Belt.
Remember that odd news-you-can-use meditation feature that ran the other day in The Los Angeles Times, the one that didn’t seem to realize there was a religion angle to the story?
OK, I know that this will be hard. But, take a deep cleansing breath and try, try, try to think back to the journalism issues that were at the heart of my first GetReligion post on this whole Chick-fil-A media hurricane.
First things first: The Indianapolis Star team deserves quite a bit of credit for the quick news feature it produced the other day about the death of Andrew Moore, a Thomas Aquinas College student who was killed while walking from coast to coast during a prayer marathon in opposition to abortion.
Think of this post, if you will, as a sequel to that “define meditation” piece that I wrote here the other day.
As always, the tragedy in Aurora led to quite a bit of writing — whether reporters knew it or not — focusing on issues linked to “theodicy,” a theological term that has frequently been discussed here at GetReligion. At the heart of all discussions of “theodicy,” by definition, are questions about the nature and origins of evil, seen in light of the existence of a good and loving God.
