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Gosh, you go on the road for a few days out into slow dial-up territory and you get behind on your daily barrage email and, lo and behold, you miss something truly interesting like this epistle.
In the comments thread to my last, a reader pointed out this article from The New York Times Book Review. The reviewer, one Kathryn Harrison, looks at Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women’s Quest for Authority.
As “Meet the Evangelicals” pieces go, Time‘s cover package this week is high-quality work. It revisits familiar faces (Billy and Franklin Graham) but also introduces names that would be less familiar even in some evangelical circles (Luis Cortes, Douglas Coe). The photographs show these evangelicals in their natural elements, looking relaxed, friendly and smart.
Here is a principle that I have tried to teach my journalism students in the decade since I left the newsroom and took a full-time gig in a college classroom. All together now: It is better to interview the person who is sitting in front of you rather than the person that you wish was sitting in front of you.
I was disappointed to see that James Carroll was the Washington Post Book World‘s pick to review John Cornwell’s new quasi-biography of John Paul II. A detailed read of the review did not let me up.
Much of the recent coverage and the commentary on James Dobson has been entirely predictable, focusing on the buffoonery of another evangelical seeing sinister forces behind another popular children’s show.
Last week, Father Kendall Harmon — an Episcopal priest who has had more than a few close encounters with the mainstream media — left a dangerous comment in response to my post about the Poynter.org debate inspired by Washington Times veteran Julia Duin’s comments on the role that experience and training play in quality religion reporting.
For the last few days, publications from dailies to weeklies to really happening websites have been putting the final touches on news and views packages on the Iraq elections, to be held Sunday (though expatriate voting has already started). And here the issue of news judgment becomes interesting.
On the evening of George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, I frantically pounded out some commentary in which I invited readers to “spot the code” words in the text, those mysterious passages in which the president sent marching orders to the theocrats.
