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A few weeks into Major League Baseball’s off-season, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel had a short story on long-time major league pitcher Salomon Torres and his announcement of his second retirement. The article focuses almost 100 percent on baseball but contained one of those classic paragraphs that briefly mentions religion and then runs away from it like it was some sort of third rail.
What do you know! One of the newspapers in a region linked to the story of the monk formerly known as Jonah Paffhausen has noticed that he was raised — 12 whole days after being consecrated as an auxiliary bishop in Dallas — to the position of metropolitan (think archbishop) of the scandal-torn Orthodox Church in America.
The free speech story out of Utah involving the Church of Summum and its desire to gain legitimacy and prominence in part by placing monuments of its Seven Aphorisms in public parks is perplexing from a legal perspective. USA Today‘s Joan Biskupic notes that Supreme Court Justices were sent reaching for “dramatic, even fanciful, scenarios” to help understand the legal consequences of various possible rulings.
Just the other day, I paid my first-ever visit to that amazing campus on the hillside above Oakland — the University of California at Berkeley.
Usually I groan when I come across an Associated Press piece marked “analysis.” I like my AP reporters to report, not analyze. But in a year like this, when reporters have dropped most pretense of reporting in favor of overtly playing politics, it’s actually kind of a breath of fresh air to have something clearly identified as analysis. On this note, if media outlets’ horribly misnamed “fact checks” could go the way of the Dodo bird, I’d be most happy.
Unlike last year, when we saw a few interesting stories about Reformation Day celebrations, I didn’t find a single one this year. Which is a shame since I was looking for an excuse to link to this awesome Reformation rap.
