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During my days at the Charlotte Observer, I had quite a few tense interviews with Southern Baptists. This in not surprising in a major New South city in the early years of the great Southern Baptist Civil War.
Christopher Scanlan of the Poynter Institute explained the power of open-ended questions, especially for the presidential debates, in a New York Times op-ed piece on Tuesday:
Was I out of the country when the decision was made to turn the presidential debates into the Hour of Power? In round two, Kerry tried to offset some of the damage he was about to incur with his answer on the Silent Scream issue by saying that he was an altar boy back in the day and that that “faith” still leads him today.
If you live in the Seattle area and would like to shake hands with GetReligion contributor Jeremy Lott, here’s your chance. Jeremy will be at Stellar Pizza & Ale this Friday (the 15th) for several hours starting at 7 p.m.
Sorry I missed this year’s New York Film Festival. According to a report, the festival featured a dogfight for top tweaking-tender- religious-sensibilities-if-there-are-any-of-those-people-here honors. But director Pedro AlmÃÆÃÆÃâódovar’s Bad Education, about priestly pedophilia, comes to the issue a bit late to lay a hand on British director Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake.
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:
