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As Terry hinted at the beginning of this month, I have taken a new job with the Anglican Communion Network. Since the early 1990s, my greatest passion as a writer has involved the moral and theological debates within the Episcopal Church.
It has felt strange to go several days without mentioning the media coverage of the scandal at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City involving the powerful 79-year-old conservative leader Msgr. Eugene Clark and his beautiful, married, much younger secretary Laura DeFilippo.
Earlier this month, I shared a dark confession. I was really hoping that somebody, somewhere, would post a copy of veteran Newsweek scribe Kenneth Woodward’s provocative essay in the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy about The New York Times and its efforts to avoid the term “partial-birth abortion” in its headlines and stories.
Can a godless society survive? That is the question that I believe USA Today‘s Noelle Knox failed to ask in her decent, if a bit shallow (USAT-style), article on the decline of religion in Western Europe.
Besides its cover story on evolution and intelligent design, the Aug. 15 issue of Time includes a sympathetic six-page spread on evangelical-owned businesses. The range of businesses includes a youth-gear chain, a beauty salon, a bank and a driving school (with the straightforward, if less than imaginative, name of Christian Faith Driving Schol).
In last week’s Washington City Paper, Huan Hsu profiled single, middle-aged members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormons. What’s so special about single, middle-aged Mormons? Well, there aren’t very many of them.
During the past few days, we have had some people ask why GetReligion hasn’t featured anything about the life and work of Peter Jennings. I held off because I quickly decided that I wanted to write about his years of advocacy for better MSM coverage of religion. My partners held off, I would guess, because they knew I had talked with Jennings about this in the past, right about the time that ABC World News Tonight took the leap of hiring religion correspondent Peggy Wehmeyer.
There is only one way that this pro-life Democrat can respond to the following little story in The Washington Post: Duh. You think? You think there’s a reason that people of various social groups keep voting against their economic self-interests? Here is the money quote about new data collected by Democratic strategists:
And now we return (music cue: a swirl of soap organ) to the continuing story of Hollywood screenwriter and Act One educator Barbara Nicolosi and her telephone dialogues with the principalities and powers at The New York Times.
