David Crumm, a veteran religion writer and columnist at the Detroit Free Press, makes an ingenious gift suggestion for Christmas: Offer a heartfelt apology to somebody.
An amazingly bookish "anti-intellectual"
Priya Jain has published a fascinating essay in Salon, which holds up the 12th-century lovers Abelard and Heloise as icons for religious progressives in the 21st century. Jain bases her essay on a biography of the couple published by British journalist James Burge earlier this year.
Desist and apologize for your blaspheming ways
Was I ever ahead of the curve on this one. Last October, when I was still assistant managing editor of the American Spectator, we ran a piece on the website by Kathy Shaidle (of Relapsed Catholic fame) about Irshad Manji, the Toronto-based writer who had just written the book The Trouble With Islam.
Our Lady of Guadalupe and the emerging Methodists
One of the trend stories right now in hip evangelicalism centers on what is called the "emerging church," a concept that is rooted in postmodernism and is just as hard to define.
Macy's II
As we were hoping earlier, Religion News Service has deigned to cover the efforts of the Committee to Save Merry Christmas.
There he goes again
Frank Rich is back and he’s still mad about The Passion and all of the hateful fundamentalists who made it one of the cultural events of the year. Once again, Rich’s goal is to paint the story in terms of Christians vs. Jews, rather than reading the evidence in his own reporting that it is largely a collision between traditional believers of many kinds and the powerful blue-zip-code coalition of oldline religious progressives and secularists. Rich says the last thing Americans will see on TV anytime soon is the nuanced, intelligent views of religious liberals. He’s right, sort of. Actually, the last thing Americans will see on TV is moral traditionalists who do not fit into the Falwell-Robertson-Donohue “straw man” chair.
¡Yo quiero politica!
Steve Taylor skewered the insularity of Christian Yellow Pages back in 1984 with his song “Guilty By Association”:
What's it all about, Democrats?
As state by heartland state turned red on the night of 11/2, a few brave Democratic strategists began hinting that something would have to be done to move their party closer to the center of American life and, in particular, to lessen its hostility to traditional religious believers who once were part of the FDR-Truman coalition.
Designer babies, gender, science and a ghost
A long, long, time ago, during a press conference with Rep. Patricia Schroeder of (D-Colo.), I asked a question that I thought was perfectly logical. At the time, she was one of the most outspoken voices in the U.S. Congress on every imaginable progressive cause, especially abortion rights and other issues linked to the lifestyle left.
