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Jimmy Breslin and the Rev. Lou Sheldon may have more in common than either man realizes — beginning with their rhetorical styles. Sheldon makes sweeping statements about gay activists, while Breslin uses a remark of doubtful merit to make sweeping statements about Sheldon (and about political and religious leaders seen in Sheldon’s presence).
Through the years I have attended my share of conferences and seminars about the status of religion coverage in the mainstream press. This is what I do.
One of the challenges that veteran God-beat reporters face is finding a way to send something new and fresh to their editors during the annual holiday seasons. Now, you could get away with quirky and strange stories during the Christmas season because, you know, that’s a cultural thing. But journalists have tended to play it straight during Holy Week and Easter, along with the heavy seasons in the other world religions. Seen any funny Yom Kippur or Ramadan stories?
Time and Newsweek devote stories this week to Prince, and both note in passing that his faith as a Jehovah’s Witness has dialed back his earlier obsessions with sex.
Well, my column is out for the week and my classes are done for the day. This is Holy Week, of course, and for the Orthodox that basically means we live at church. It’s a beautiful time, though hectic. There are so many stories that I want to point out and comment on from the past few days that I don’t even know where to start. I’ll try to catch up.
It’s difficult to decide who is more insufferable when Deborah Solomon of The New York Times Magazine interviews former nun Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God and, most recently, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness.
I think Doug and I now know what we want for Christmas. We want a blog software package that prevents people from making anonymous posts in the “comments” pages.
Three cheers for a Boston Globe essay that may calm some fears of George W. Bush as the End Times President. The essay is by Alan Jacobs, an English professor at Wheaton College, which may be enough to disqualify him in certain provincialist circles. (Recall how only last month the Globe’s competition, the Boston Herald, instructed its readers that Wheaton “counts holy roller Billy Graham among its alumni.”)
This is the kind of brief “news” story that makes me (a) laugh out loud and then (b) once I have laughed out loud, a wave of depression crashes in and I am tempted to rethink my opposition to the death penalty.
