Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As you would imagine, legions of readers from around the world saw fit to email us copies of David Brooks’ op-ed page tribute to the great evangelical Anglican apologist John Stott. Nothing causes evangelicals to cut and paste and then click send (or forward) as much as a kind word for traditional faith in the pages of the Bible of the blue zip-code elites.
At Mass this Sunday I had a bit of a cough, though nothing bad compared with the seriously congested woman who sat down behind me. I thought she was going to hack up a lung as she settled into the pew. She made half throat-clearing, half choking noises throughout the service.
Somebody on The Independent‘s copy desk loves wordplay, but wit does not always equal news. Consider “Alexander the (not so) Great fails to conquer America’s homophobes,” a breathless report by John Hiscock (in Los Angeles) and James Burleigh that says Oliver Stone’s latest film has “brutally exposed the cultural and moral divide which slices America in two.” Ouch!
Rather than a series of separate blog items, here are three quick updates on recent items of interest (not including my finale — maybe — in the Incredibles paranoia trilogy).
Our colleague Jeremy Lott will not post as often for the next few days as he fills in for one of our favorite bloggers, Charlotte Hays at Beliefnet. (Bloggers Charlotte Allen, Domenico Bettinelli Jr., Rod Dreher, Barbara Nicolosi, Kathy Shaidle and Mark Shea have filled in for her on other days.)
Salon has published a nearly 6,000-word essay today on the complicated relationship between Sylvia Plath and her longtime therapist, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse. Writer Karen Maroda offers a sympathetic but critical portrait of Barnhouse, who died in 1999, and refers to an undercurrent of love between the therapist and her famous patient.
And this just in from the “values” wars. Sen. Edward Kennedy has asked member of his staff to investigate how liberals can talk about God. They may even need to do a better job of talking about God on television and the Internet, in order to compete with those mass-media superstars Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
The headline and deck in the Dec. 6 BusinessWeek (Economists Are Getting Religion: Can organized faith be explained by supply and demand? They think so) might create dread among believers. Are some pointy-headed intellectuals going to reduce the complexity, mystery and wonder of faith to something so mundane as commerce and “product”?
Please understand that I realize that religious faith is quite controversial in Europe these days — especially anything that is highly symbolic of the ancient Christian past. I mean, this pope is currently all but leading a rebellion against the legal recognition of the post-Christian reality that is the European Union.
