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“Do We Need More Christian Movie Critics?” was the first question on Slate‘s teaser for this year’s annual gabfest of the country’s top film critics about the films of the previous year. The question was raised by Armond White, a reviewer for the New York Press, in response to the near-unanimous condemnation of The Passion of the Christ by his fellow symposiasts:
OK, the British news story wasn’t that long to begin with. But people keep sending it to me and, after days of the barrage, I have decided to (a) relent and (b) link it to another subject we have been dealing with for some time now.
In one of the most illuminating passages in his autobiography, Here I Stand, retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong recalls the strict environment of his childhood:
I just got off an airplane returning from a brief research trip to Tampa, where I spent a wonderful day at the Poynter Institute talking to the usual cast of bright people about newspapers, blogs, religion news, editors, reporters, producers, the future of news and all kinds of connected stuff. What can I say? It’s what I do.
ÃÆâÃâÃâ¬Ãââ The Guardian reports on a harmonic convergence of weirdness known as Jerry Springer: The Opera:
In one of his books, Dilbert creator Scott Adams wrote that he feels whale guilt — not guilt that he’s not doing anything to save the whales per se, but guilt that he doesn’t feel guilty about not doing anything to save the whales.
It took several days for the mainstream media to find a way to focus on the religious element of tsunami tragedy in South and Southeast Asia. This often happens with events that are simply too stunning and too important for the leaders of major print and electronic media to see them as “religion stories.”
Hanna Rosin of The Washington Post has written a fairly good analysis for The Atlantic of religious believers’ role in the 2004 election. The central insight of the essay comes in this remark from Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission: “I’ve got more in common with Pope John Paul II than I do with Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton.”
William J. Stuntz, whose “Faculty Clubs and Church Pews” essay drew a year-end endorsement from New York Times columnist David Brooks, now lists the issues on which he believes the secular left and the Christian right may cooperate: abortion, poverty at home, poverty abroad and spreading freedom/nation building.
