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Once again, the New York Times is shocked, shocked to discover that a few of the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops believe that there should be a connection between abortion (an issue treated with singular seriousness by the Vatican) and the ballot box (the final holy of holies for newspaper elites).
Here at GetReligion we’ve protested when writers draw glib connections between religious belief and heinous behavior. “Follow the Mullahs,” Stephen Grey’s report in the latest Atlantic, is a refreshing exception to that pattern. Writing about efforts to authenticate a message attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Grey introduces the phrase forensic theology:
We don’t blog on opinion columns much, but there is a source and some factual material in this recent George Will column that points in the direction of hard news and that dreaded pew gap angle. So some Brits discover that the very essence of American conservatism is rooted in “anomalous religiosity” and the institutions that grow out of it in politics. So what is the answer to that? The development of a true religious left that is a winner, as opposed to the fading numbers of the old mainline. Once again — where is the Da Vinci Vote?
In most mainstream news reports, President Bush’s campaign is built on a foundation of right-wing religious zealots who want to lock homosexuals in closets, trample women’s rights and, what the heck, flirt with a Left-Behind nuclear showdown by building a Messianic Jewish megachurch on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
It’s hard to know what criteria apply to scoring the presidential debates anymore, but it’s a safe bet to say that when pundits are looking at last night’s contest and comparing the president to Aristotle, we can call it a Bush win. Before the debate, I had heard lots of carping by conservatives about the faux town hall format, in which supposedly undecided voters usually pepper candidates with questions about what government can do for them, but that was not the thrust of most of the queries.
The Oct. 11 issue of The New Yorker (not yet available online) includes an eight-page article about Creflo Dollar, who preaches what is widely called prosperity theology. The article, by New York Times writer Kelefa Sanneh, mines some of the rich details a reader would expect in a New Yorker profile, such as these:
Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold of the Episcopal Church has responded to Archbishop Peter Akinola’s description of a private conversation with Griswold. (Today’s picture shows Griswold, Akinola and Desmond Tutu together at a U.S. House of Bishops meeting in 2002.)
The more one looks at the literature put out by Australia’s upstart Family First Party, the less adequate our treatment of the party thus far appears. Go to the website and read the FFP’s positions and the reasoning behind them. The party is having to defend itself against charges that it is the political arm of the Assemblies of God church. A vote for Family First, opponents warn, is a vote for fundamentalist Protestantism.
We don’t go out of our way, here at GetReligion, to write about articles featured in religion publications and we certainly don’t throw a lot of digital ink at the materials sent out by denominational press offices and public-relations companies.
