This past weekend, as happens every summer solstice, something special reportedly happened at Stonehenge. As the Associated Press reported:
Why pagans party at Stonehenge on solstice
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Martyrdom and mourning cycles in Iran
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting much of my news about Iran from Twitter. This weekend, many of the Tehran-related items were about Neda, a protesting woman who was killed with a shot to the chest. I have chosen not to watch, but there are graphic videos of the death. As those of us outside Iran are struggling to understand all of the social, political and religious nuances at play there, I must comment Robin Wright’s article in Time about the death’s consequences to the struggle there:
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Bringing Luther to ... Wittenberg?
Every time I read a story from the Washington Post Foreign Service, it makes me sad that newspapers can’t afford to have correspondents throughout the globe. The latest exceptional piece was filed by Craig Whitlock and headlined “In German Birthplace of Reformation, a Revival of Interest.” Here’s how it begins:
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What would the Mahdi do?
Every now and then, editors really need to bite the bullet and tell their troops, “OK, this is just getting too complicated. We are going to have to make room for a sidebar that lets our readers know what in the heckfire we are talking about.”
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More SSPX men in black?
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(Almost) wholly ungrounded
As I read the story from the Citizen-Times.com website, I tried to remember a few basics about what it’s like to write for a paper in a smaller market. Local papers (as in Asheville, North Carolina) might not have a full-time religion reporter. They often don’t have space for longer articles, thus making it possible for details to get lost. And they may assume that their local readers know about churches and institutions that those of us surfing from “abroad” might not know.
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Habeas corpus, postmaster?
After having argued in my Tuesday post that not all Episcopalians are theological innovators, imagine my anxiety while perusing read this article on the telegraph.co.uk website. “Church leaders offer communion wafer in the post” reads the headline. Communion wafers, eh? Must be a liturgical denomination — or a remarkably tacky secular entrepreneur. Hope it’s not the Anglicans or some sister freelancers across the pond!
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Bells that raise strange questions
Here is another one of those strange little — repeat “little” — church-state stories that a few readers continue to ask about, via personal emails.
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Lines in the sand
Last month I attended a meeting of Episcopal clergy. Most of us were middle-aged and elderly, longtime denizens of parish ministry. We spent some time talking about the Scriptures for that Sunday. Then I asked them what they thought of the Rev. Kevin G. Thew Forrester (got to be Episcopalian, with that name), a controversial bishop candidate in the Diocese of Northern Michigan.
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