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In his latest Slate dispatch, Christopher Hitchens (in a departure from his pre-election shrug) comes out swinging for George W. Bush. He begins by taking "strong exception" to the charge that one must be a "God-bothering, pulpit-pounding Armageddon-artist, enslaved by ancient texts and prophecies and committed to theocratic rule" to have backed Bush in this go-round.
The GetReligion crew has been traveling the last two days to attend planning meetings for this blog and other related projects.
Newspapers in greater Philadelphia have begun reporting on the past Druidic interests of the Rev. William Melnyk and his wife, the Rev. Glyn Lorraine Ruppe-Melnyk, but some have lost the story’s finer distinctions.
Well now. Please note that almost nothing in the current torrent of debate about the Rod Dreher column has anything to do with the purpose of the original blog article, except that this is a demonstration of how hard this kind of bitter debate is to cover in a newspaper.
(Cue: drum roll) Here is something that seems a bit bizarre to contemplate. GetReligion readers, I bring you the journalistic team of Rod Dreher and Alexander Cockburn. It will take a moment to get to the second half of that equation.
Even as disaffected American liberals consider moving to Canada in the wake of the last week’s elections, many Canadian journalists are trying to figure out what the heck happened. Some of the early attempts at deciphering the results are not promising.
I think we can expect the New York Times op-ed page to continue its high-wire routine for quite some time to come, trying to find the balance between fury, denial and insight when it comes to the pew gap. More on that in a minute.
A few years ago I served on an advisory board for Forward Movement, an editorial arm of the Episcopal Church that actually publishes tracts (it calls them pamphlets), a daily devotional called Forward Day by Day and a number of books. I disagree with much of what Forward publishes, but I feel an enduring affection for the people behind the imprint.
Under normal conditions, I am not a big-time reader of the business sections in American newspapers. Most of the time, they focus 99 percent of their ink on people who own businesses, instead of covering the people who work in them, are affected by their actions or who purchase goods and services from them. It’s a corporate thing. In a way, it’s like the old religion pages in newspapers that only covered what was going on in religious denominations and bureaucracies. Where are the people?
