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I am in Washington, D.C., at the moment up to my eyebrows in the first few days of the 11th annual Summer Institute of Journalism here at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities — about a 10-minute walk from the U.S. Capitol. See this if that interests you.
Meg James of the Los Angeles Times has a good ear for the deadpan humor of network executives talking like network executives. Witness Leslie Moonves, the immeasurably hip 56-year-old chairman of CBS, discussing some programming changes:
I missed a Boston Globe profile of science philosopher Michael Ruse at the beginning of this month, but Rich Poll’s Apologia Report has pointed it out. Ruse, a vigorous defender of evolution, distinguishes between evolution and evolutionism, and he criticizes fellow academicians who do not see the clash of worldviews behind the public debates.
There is a point at which media criticism becomes rather censorious, and I think we’ve crossed it in the Newsweek scandal. Jonah Goldberg, in his latest column for National Review Online, writes of Michael Isikoff’s motive for breaking the story, “my guess is that [he] was more motivated by a reporter’s desire to break a story than by some Left-wing anti-Americanism.” Then he gets to the argument:
As part of the never-ending quest for political metaphors after the red-blue divide, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press has developed a nifty little online test in an attempt to give a snapshot of the basic political viewpoints in the land.
A few years ago, when one Internet wag wanted to poke fun at President Bush’s faith, the face from Salman’s “Head of Christ” replaced the head of Michael Gerson in the photo that accompanies this post. (GetReligion did not create that image, but has used it with irony.)
This week’s Time promises more than it delivers in saying that the feature story “The Posse in the Pulpit” offers “a portrait of the pastors who are leading the offensive against the filibuster.”
If Darwinian orthodoxy (think naturalism for a moment, not common descent) is the default god mechanism for Western intellectual elites (think New York Times editorial pages), then Steven Pinker’s “Sniffing Out the Gay Gene” piece is a rare chance to see a cluster of gods duke it out in the public square.
Newsweek is in full retreat amid the fallout from its Qur’an shredding story. In the current issue, editor Mark Whitaker admitted that there were some problems with the sourcing and signed off with this:
