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Europe’s Sky News is reporting an undercover “investigation” on highly controversial religious leader Fred Phelps. With reporting like this in Europe on religion in America, Europeans will be loving us about as much the Israelis appreciated their Roman rulers. The problem in this case is that you can’t really fault the Sky News report for overly hyping the basic facts in the story.
David Gates of Newsweek makes a nearly perfect comparison regarding novelist Anne Rice’s late work, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt — “It’s the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan’s ‘Slow Train Coming’ announced that he’d been born again.”
First of all, I need to state the obvious. A long time ago I was I was a rock columnist in a mainstream newspaper, and you only have to do that job for, oh, a week or so to learn that Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times is one of the giants. So that is a given.
I am not a frequent reader of the magazine Maxim, but it did carry a rather humorous article on how to “score in church.” While the article is quite crude in its advice and I would not encourage anyone to try “this at home,” or at church for that matter, it is an interesting look at how a different worldview sees Christianity and the American church scene.
I ran into a minister the other day over at the Naval Academy, a man I’ve known for about 10 years. He was leading a really interesting project, one directly linked to a topic that comes up often on this blog — offensive free speech.
Some of you will recall that we recently had a lively thread here at GetReligion on “cafeteria Catholicism” and Rome’s teachings on the death penalty.
Newsweek magazine splashed a story on the growth of the Mormon Church on its cover last week. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints keeps receiving more and more media coverage, and it is handling it quite well, considering some of its more controversial teachings.
The October 17 issue of The New Yorker features an extended profile of Jørn Utzon, the Pritzker Award-winning architect who designed the Sydney Opera House. The profile, written by Geraldine Brooks, focuses on how Utzon was dismissed from the Sydney project because of tensions with a minister of public works who was elected midway through the building project.
