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Based on the number of people who have sent me the URL, many of our readers have already read the Howard Kurtz column in the Washington Post entitled “When Left Is Right and Right Is Wrong.”
The cover copy for this week’s U.S. News & World Report promises more than its reporters deliver, especially in the deck: “Searching for the truth between Mel Gibson and the Gospels.” The deck implies that Gibson and the Gospels represent different extremes, and that U.S. News — still so attached to its News You Can Use formula that it splashes a white-on-red Annual Career Guide banner atop the cover — will sort it all out for us with businesslike efficiency.
According to Variety, there is an interesting dance going on right now between the New York Times and some sources in the Hollywood establishment.
Christopher Johnson of Midwest Conservative Journal had great fun last week in exposing the boilerplate style in two letters by Frank Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. Many paragraphs that first appeared in a letter Griswold wrote to his fellow primates of the Anglican Communion (Aug. 19, 2003) found a new life in his letter to Alexey II, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church (Dec. 19, 2003).
The Passion email flood is beginning to slow a bit, as everyone waits to see if there are enough people in Hollywood who think The Lord of the Rings is too conservative to be given the top Oscar. I’m not joking. I mean, it’s pro-Truth with a Big T. If it wins, that’s a victory for the Religious Right, right?
Here is a quick list of some of the major stories about the new Catholic clergy sexual abuse reports. This is a list of secular newspaper reports, collected on the blog of the conservative Catholic World News. This is a good site for insights from conservative clergy and laity. The National Catholic Reporter, of course, represents the other side of the aisle.
Leaders of the Religion Newswriters Association are not very happy (once again) with the leaders of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference.
I am happy to report that the library at the Poynter Institute has created a quick-reference page with resources for professionals who walk the God beat.
In her brief article “Not Just for Abortion Anymore” (Wired, March), Laura Fraser reports that researchers at Stanford believe RU-486 may “dramatically help in the treatment of major psychotic depression, which causes delusions and hallucinations, and often ends in suicide.”
