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A busy time of travel prevented me from seeing “Darwin in the Dock,” Margaret Talbot’s crackling New Yorker narrative of the intelligent-design debates in the courtroom of federal judge John E. Jones III.
I have a friend who makes fun of the stories that repeat every year on local news stations. His favorites are “Grocery scanners rip you off!” and “Our blacklight shows hotel comforters are dirty!”
Kudos to the Denver Post, a paper I used to deliver in the wee hours, for devoting the resources necessary for last Sunday’s special report on the death of young Dylan Walborn.
As you might expect, various members of the GetReligion team are headed out various doors in various directions for various purposes for varying amounts of time during the Christmas season (which begins Dec. 25, thank you very much).
I am somewhat afraid to do this, but let me briefly comment on something Mollie said in the, as usual, lively GetReligion wars over media bias on evolution, creationism, naturalism, fundamentalism and various other terms that the media cannot get straight, in terms of using definitions that ring true to the activists being quoted (sometimes accurately and sometimes not).
A long, long time ago, the journalist Stephen Bates wrote a stunning book entitled “Battleground: One Mother’s Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Control of Our Classrooms.” You knew it was an amazing book because the back cover was full of praise from scholars, journalists and acitivists on the left as well as the right. His thesis: Our public schools have become so biased against traditional forms of religion that they are, ultimately, undercutting the foundations of America’s heritage of public education. They are driving away millions of parents and, thus, their children.
I am glad Young Master Pulliam cited the story below, which properly states that the “War on Christmas” was — and is — waged most furiously by some Calvinists. But there was a doozie of a problem with it:
When Bill O’Rielly makes a lot of noise about something, does that make it a story? I would hope not.
I’m a rather disinterested party in the whole intelligent design versus evolution debate so I don’t follow it as much as I should. But there is something so bizarre about the federal judge in Pennsylvania’s ruling yesterday, and attendant coverage, that I feel forced to comment. I think we could write on various aspects of this story for weeks to come, but here’s a start.
