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Thursday’s dedication ceremonies for the Clinton Presidential Center offered some stirring images — including the presidential families all standing to watch Bono and the Edge performing (Windows Media) — and generous examples of presidents seeing the best in one another.
One of the toughest clauses in the basic religion-beat reporter contract is the one that states: “Thou shalt write at least one or two stories every year during every major religious holiday and these stories may not be recycled more than once a decade.” Ugh.
Dawn Eden, a longtime music writer and now a copy editor at the New York Post, today celebrates her first appearance on an op-ed page with her witty piece “The Grinch Who Stole Messiah.” Eden criticizes the South Orange/Maplewood School District’s policy of banning religious music — now including instrumentals — during students’ holiday concerts.
It is impossible for the nation’s Catholic bishops to gather in Washington, D.C., without making some kind of news.
Here’s another story from the tidal wave just after the election that has continued to bother me a bit. The headline was “G.O.P. Adviser Says Bush’s Evangelical Strategy Split Country” and the basic concept was that the Christian right has totally taken control of the Republican Party, according to veteran GOP consultant Arthur Finkelstein. It now has veto power over the party’s choice for president. (Hear that, Rudy?) Early on, he says: “From now on, anyone who belongs to the Republican Party will automatically find himself in the same group as the opponents of abortion, and anyone who supports abortion will automatically be labeled a Democrat.” Actually, if you read that statement in a mirror, you’d have a pretty good summary of the 2004 Democratic Party platform.
Ever since the rise of the religious right, mainstream journalists have focused an extraordinary amount of attention on its growing clout in the Republican Party and its influence on public policy.
The Washington Post has published a follow-up to its two-article series on Michael Shackelford, a gay teenager living in the very red locale of Sand Springs, eight miles west of Tulsa. When the Post concluded its second article on Sept. 26, Shackelford had decided he would feel more at home by joining his older sister in Las Vegas.
For the French, it’s bound to be the most annoying American phenomenon since the freedom fries fiasco. Tom Hanks reportedly beat out Harrison Ford, George Clooney, and Hugh Jackman to star in the movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, to be directed by Ron Howard. Barring complications, the film should be in theatres in early 2006.
William Lobdell of the Los Angeles Times touches all the right bases in his report about churches that think of more than their address and service times when they design advertising.
