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The latest issue of Seattle’s The Stranger uses this year’s NARAL Chocolate for Choice fundraiser — an “evening of utter decadence . . . supporting a woman’s right to choose” — to look at the shifting politics of abortion, from the perspective of the left and the Democratic Party.
Let’s set the wayback machine to last summer, when one of the hottest stories linked to politics and religion was the state of Sen. John Kerry’s soul or, at the very least, his ability to receive Holy Communion in mainstream Roman Catholic parishes.
Joseph Bottum (alternately known as J. Bottum, or just Jody to friends and acquaintances) has a theatricality about him and so I expected that, in leaving the post of books and arts editor at The Weekly Standard to become editor of First Things, he would not go quietly. That expectation turns out to have been right on the money, but I should have doubled down on the bet.
Anglican-beat reporters, please repeat after me once again: The Africans pray, the Americans pay and the British write the resolutions.
Another day, another stay in the Terri Schiavo case. On Wednesday, Judge George Greer extended the stay on Michael Schiavo’s plans to remove the tubes that deliver food and water to his brain-damaged wife. It was the second time this week that Terri was given a reprieve.
No obituary this week can do full justice to Dr. Gene Scott, the most contrarian Christian ever to have his own TV show. His hometown papers, the Los Angeles Times and the Pasadena Star-News, cover the wildest highlights.
To experience today’s Peggy Noonan column, one really needs to call it up on the Web. It is, in effect, the first Noonan blog — only printed in a newspaper. What should we call that? Religion news and trends run all the way through it, right down to the last bite (the pope’s email address). Here she is on the Harvard holy wars about President Larry Summers: “What the Summers story most illustrates is that American universities now seem like Medieval cloisters. They’re like a cloister without the messy God part. Old monks of leftism walk their hallowed halls in hooded robes, chanting to themselves. Young nuns of leftist deconstructionism, pale as orchids, walk along wringing their hands, listening to their gloomy music. They become hysterical at the antichrist of a new idea, the instrusion of the reconsideration of settled matter. Get thee behind me, Summers.”
Back in the 1980s, while working as the religion editor for the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, I interviewed a man who was a chaplain to NASCAR racers and their families. The chaplain was kind, and patient with my astonishment that NASCAR drivers would feel any interest in his services.
