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Speaking of Fred Barnes and the faith factor, there is a great Fred moment in his op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal. In effect, it opens with Sen. George F. Allen of Virginia trying out his “cultural right” soundbites for the most influential “cultural right” journalist in D.C. journalism.
Gentrification is a big issue in Washington, D.C. Local journalists have done an adequate job of covering the clash between cultures and minorities being priced out of neighborhoods as property values rise.
Because I am one of those people — cultural conservatives who go to church all the time — many of my friends in academia and journalism assume that I watch Fox News.
Cathleen Falsani, the Chicago Sun-Times religion reporter — and author of the new book The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People — had an interesting story that ran on (Western) Easter Sunday. Rather than taking the controversy tack used by so many others, she wrote an article about all the different translations and versions of the Bible:
I guess we’ll never find out whether Opus Dei is a scary “authoritarian and semi-clandestine enterprise” or merely a “teaching entity,” an “advanced school for Catholic spiritual formation.” In this era of postmodernism, where there is no truth, might both realities be presented as truth?
I have waited awhile to do an update on the MSM coverage of Jason Johnson, the gay student who was kicked out of the University of the Cumberlands, a school with Baptist roots. The story is still alive at two levels: (1) Key factual details remain a mystery and (2) there is an interesting church-state issue linked to state funds. More on that later.
Sunday’s New York Times Magazine carried a relatively in-depth profile of Larry Ross, dubbed as possibly “the top public relations man for Christian clients in America.” The premise of the article (which goes along the lines of “Why does Jesus Christ need a publicist?”) is thought-provoking, and one that I’m sure came easily to the author, Strawberry Saroyan (author of Girl Walks into a Bar: A Memoir).
Even though I’m a reporter, I only recently began reading bylines as part of my newspaper experience.
