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In 1998, when former Marxist dictator Pol Pot died before he could be brought to trial for ordering the deaths of millions of fellow Cambodians, there was a small item in the unsigned editorial section of National Review. If memory serves, it read “The war crimes trial of Pol Pot has now been moved to a higher court.”
This is a longer version of a report I’ve written for The Living Church. I post it here because it’s another piece of evidence that the Episcopal Church’s conflicts are growing more intense rather than slackening. — Douglas LeBlanc
Rob Moll at the always wide-ranging blog at ChristianityToday.com has a fine piece online addressing some of Nicholas Kristof’s recent efforts to praise, dissect and criticize evangelical Christians and other believers who he sees as irrationally old fashioned. It seems that Christian tradition is a good thing, when he agrees with it, and a very bad thing, when it crimps his cultural style. Kristof wants readers to think he is seriously investigating Christian history and thought, then he throws in cheap shots such as this: “When a Texas governor, Miriam ‘Ma’ Ferguson, barred the teaching of foreign languages about 80 years ago, saying, ‘If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.’”
Another item from the GetReligion assignment desk, for religion reporters or writers with a healthy interest in globalization.
I was reading my newspaper the other day and hit a story that just made me sick. I don’t watch a lot of commercial television and, somehow, I had missed one of the hot shows in the tornado of “reality TV” programming. I refer to “The Swan,” from those cultural conservatives at Fox.
Jerome Weeks of the Dallas Morning News recalls the golden days when John Adams, a “more traditional Christian” than Thomas Jefferson (Adams was a Unitarian), declared that “the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
In the three years I have lived in Palm Beach County, I have met legions of people who have stopped their subscriptions to the Palm Beach Post, in large part because of the newspaper’s relentless attacks on religious believers who take a traditional approach to faith and morality. I started out trying to calm these people down, assuming they were blowing things out of proportion.
Cathleen Falsani of the Chicago Sun-Times moves well beyond the pedantic slogan that God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat by touching base with her former roommates from Wheaton College.
How does that old saying go? Presidential politics makes for interesting one-night stands. In pursuit of a singular goal — getting more votes than the other guy — arguments are advanced during election season that would not be tolerated by the parties’ bases at any other time.
