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This week, The Washington Times ran a three-part series (links here, here, and here) by religion reporter Julia Duin. The umbrella title for the series was “Faithless: God under fire in the public square,” and the 7,200-word package serves as an interesting look into the world of the Christian and secular activists who are fighting over how much religion should be allowed to shape public policy and public life.
Maybe it’s just the mass-media professor in me who is used to chanting “technology shapes content.” But, you know, I sort of see a link between the following two stories in those radically different Washington, D.C., daily newspapers.
CBSNews.com commentator Dick Meyer thinks he has a new, fresh insight into the pope, politics, faith and cutlure in his “The Devoutness Divide.” And that would be true, if he were writing pre-1991, pre-James Davison Hunter, pre-”Culture Wars” (as Hunter actually defined that term).
Later this month, the Newport Beach Film Festival will include a documentary on Lonnie Frisbee, a charismatic figure who helped shape the early Jesus Movement.
You can agree or disagree, but conservative religion columnist Michael “Marriage Savers” McManus — a mainstream Protestant — has an interesting point to make about the papal conclave. He asks this question: In the age of imploding ordination statistics, would a Third World pope — especially one from Africa — be more likely to allow priests to get married than a pope from Europe or elsewhere in the First World?
Everywhere I turn this week, reproduction and contraception are in the news. Maybe it’s the Spring factor (enemy of people with allergies and all haters of public displays of affection) or maybe the death and funeral of the pope have set off a few moral tremors. Who knows? Item: New York senator and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has promised to block a Senate floor vote in the new nominee for head of the Food and Drug Administration until he agrees to rule on the proposal to make “Plan B,” the “morning after” pill, available over the counter. Item: Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick threw a hissy fit over the wave of cases where pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions for the pill — either the pre-emptive variety or the morning after edition. Item: Economist Steven D. Levitt’s new book Freakonomics is getting a lot of mileage out of Levitt’s old charge that abortion reduces crime (by eliminating a lot of would-be criminals). “Ahem!” says movie critic/crack statistics guy Steve Sailer.
NPR ombudsman — ombudsperson? — Jeffrey A. Dvorkin has posted a very interesting column about listener reactions to the network’s coverage of the life and death of Pope John Paul II. He says that hundreds of NPR regulars have written in to protest, saying that there has been too much coverage and that it has been wildly out of balance — too positive.
The first vote by the papal conclave on Monday cannot come soon enough, if only to relieve the incessant speculation about frontrunners. The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post all have repeated the forecast in Milan’s Corriere della Sera that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is the man to beat.
