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If someone really wants to start a media rumor, there are worse places to put it than PAGE SIX in the New York Post. Thus, for the past week, I have been watching the ripples spreading from this apocalyptic report, which is offered with minimal editing:
Michelle Cotelle of The New Republic has written a thoughtful cover profile of K.A. Paul, an evangelist from India who is building a reputation as a geopolitical (or, if you prefer, theopolitical) troubleshooter. Paul does his work through Gospel to the Unreached Millions and the more web-savvy Global Peace Initiative.
There was a sobering angle on the Iraq-prison abuse story today, hidden down in the body of the latest Howard Kurtz media column in the Washington Post. Find that headline, “A Kerry-Worrying Trend” and then dig down past the layers of inside-the-Beltway paranoia and score keeping.
A consistent theme in coverage of the United Methodist Church’s General Conference was how “stunned” delegates were by a suggestion of freeing theologically divided Methodists to go their separate ways. Reporters also seemed stunned by the idea: after conservatives won the crucial votes on sexuality issues, sometimes by substantial majorities, why would William Hinson of the Confessing Movement within The United Methodist Church float such a risky trial balloon?
An interesting problem has developed here in the blogosphere. I have no idea whether it has affected any of our readers. In fact, I do not know if it has prevented us from having any readers and I have no idea how to find out whether it has or not.
Earlier this week the Vero Beach Press Journal published “Ma’s Ashram,” a four-day series on Kashi, a Hindu ashram in Sebastian, Fla., founded by Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati. (She’s known simply as “Ma” to followers and detractors alike).
Maybe it’s the fact that I was raised as a Southern Baptist preacher’s son, but I have never been very comfortable with the “F word.” No, not “Fundamentalist.” The other one.
Newsweek gives a brief plug this week to Spiritual Cinema Circle, which distributes spiritually oriented films on DVD to its paying members.
When journalists want to know who “evangelical Christians” are and what they believe, one of the first people they call is the quotable pollster George Barna.
