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I know Turkey is a secular state. As a reader of books about the Middle East (such as this fine one) and as someone who got a degree in political science, I have heard all about Kemal Ataturk and the secular founding of the country. But I had never appreciated how secular Turkey was until I read reporter Laura King’s story in The Los Angeles Times.
Some tragic news is coming out of Tennessee. Yesterday, a man armed with a shotgun walked into a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville yesterday and killed two people and shot seven others. Whenever something senseless like this happens, the media rush to determine why. Early reports from Knoxville had neighbors suspecting anti-Christian animus:
Paul Z. Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris, has made his best effort at enraging as many people as possible by defiling that which is considered sacred by millions around the globe. Some are even considering how his actions could possibly impact the “future of life in our pluralistic democracy.”
Readers of The Miami Herald‘s sports section may be wondering if the newspaper’s sports department is on the hunt to hire a religion expert. Based on the last couple of days of football coverage, it may not be a bad investment although they are doing fairly well with what they have at this point.
In recent days, I have continued to comb the coverage of the Radovan Karadzic arrest, looking for clues that might indicate where reporters were getting the tips that this monster had spent parts of the past few decades hiding in Eastern Orthodox monasteries and churches.
Needless to say, I received some interesting emails in the hours after the New York Times and the rest of the world’s mainstream media started running the following story. The words changed a bit, but here is the key info from the Times:
This is one of those cases where I simply want to point out a story and urge GetReligion readers to check it out.
Once again,the Rt. Rev. Douglas LeBlanc has spotted another reference to the Anglican Communion as one of the world’s largest and most diverse organizations.
As a gentile, I learned to think of the Jewish people mainly in religious terms. Reading the Old Testament alongside the New Testament will do that to a goy.
