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The editors of Arts & Letters Daily state it bluntly: “If God is God, he’s not good. If God is good, he’s not God. You can’t have it both ways, especially not after the Indian Ocean catastrophe.”
In order to deal with the dearth of "hard" news that usually comes at the end of the year, columnists and magazines come up with gimmicks to fill space and keep readers interested. Time has the person of the year, Jeff Jacoby collects a "liberal hate speech" folder and shares the results with readers (favorite bit from this year’s column: "The St. Petersburg, Fla., Democratic Club took out an ad calling for the death of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. ‘Then there’s Rumsfeld who said of Iraq, "We have our good days and our bad days . . . We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say, "This is one of our bad days," and pull the trigger.’").
Anyone who has been reading GetReligion in the wake of 11/2 knows I am convinced that one of the major stories of 2005 will be the early signs of what the religious left will do to help the political left address the “pew gap.”
More than two decades ago, my graduate advisers at the University of Illinois gave early approval to the idea of me writing my final project about the state of religion coverage in mainstream American newsrooms, which I also condensed for The Quill. One professor was skeptical, until I brought him a copy of the Associated Press’ top 10 stories for the previous year. At least six of the stories were linked to religion.
Here’s a quick way to take the theological pulse of churchgoers. Imagine you’re attending an urban parish with a reputation for liberal theology and political activism. Your new senior pastor begins the Lord’s Prayer with “Our Mother and Father in heaven,” baptizes children in the name of “the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sustainer,” attends an anti-war rally in Washington and offers unequivocal support when the associate pastor announces from the pulpit that she is a lesbian.
You know, apart from trifling matters such as suicide bombers, acute shortages, a plummeting U.S. dollar, and lousy troop morale, I thought the Iraq occupation/handover was going swimmingly. We had a date certain to hold elections and, after, the U.S. could make concrete plans to withdraw, and Iraqis could go about charting their own course.
The Christian Science Monitor reports today on the important and sometimes troubling intersection of church and commerce, but correspondent G. Jeffrey MacDonald’s compact article sometimes omits important points.
So the lavish Sawbridgeworth, England, estate of soccer megastar David Beckham and his wife, Victoria — formerly known as pop tart “Posh Spice” — contains its own private chapel. Who knew?
Stung by charges that the U.S. is being “stingy” with the amount of foreign aid to alleviate the suffering of the thousands of victims of the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean, bellicose bloggers such as Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds have directed readers to a donations page at Amazon and advised them to do their worst.
