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As I have stressed in the past, it has been hard for me to write about the wars at Baylor University because of my close connections with the campus. I’ve known Dr. Robert Sloan for many years and consider him a friend and colleague in the wider ecumenical world of Christian higher education.
It must be the week for stories about how evangelical Christians are turning their backs on Republican politics. Laurie Goodstein’s New York Times piece on Gregory Boyd is still rockin’ the charts, even driving Boyd’s book from #32,738 to #54 on Amazon.
Anyone who paid close attention during the EWTN interviews with Mel Gibson, released during that Christian-media PR wave before The Passion of the Christ, could read between the lines.
Laila Kain’s very long article in the Hartford Courant‘s NE magazine on the departure of longtime television news anchor Steve Bunnell from the news business to the evangelism business is a great example of what can be done when a journalist gets a whole lot of space to fill and a whole lot of time to fill it.
We would have looked at Laurie Goodstein’s New York Times piece on an evangelical pastor disowning Republican politics even if many of our readers hadn’t asked us to. Apparently a number of you had strong feelings about the piece, some loving it and some not so much. It’s also the second-most-e-mailed story on the Times website right now.
When I was in college, about the time that the Earth’s crust cooled, there were two kinds of moviegoers at Baylor University, the world’s largest Southern Baptist institution of higher learning. There were the people who went to Woody Allen movies and the people who did not.
Naveed Haq was anything but an Islamic radical. He was a recently baptized convert to Christianity, and he expressed interest in Mormonism. His father, on the other hand, is a leader in the Muslim American community in Richland, Wash. It’s fair to say that the entire story line of a crazed Islamic radical shooting up a Jewish organization has been turned on its head.
Six shot in an apparent hate crime. One person dead. One man, antagonistic toward Jewish organizations, acting on his own.
Tomorrow afternoon, Mollie Ziegler, a journalist from Washington, D.C., will be crowned Miss America. At least that’s how she sees it.
