Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
In response to my last post on fears that shaking hands and sharing a common communion cup just might increase the chances of infection during flu season, reader Garrett Brown pointed us to an article by Anne LaGrange Loving, a professor of microbiology.
A decade ago, a sharp Harvard-educated think tank wonk named Stephen Bates wrote an important book — praised by everyone from E.J. Dionne Jr. to Father Richard John Neuhaus — that I still hear quoted in Beltway discussions from time to time.
Pundits belittled Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop in the 1980s, when their book and film series Whatever Happened to the Human Race? predicted that euthanasia and infanticide were the logical companions of unrestricted abortion.
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.
