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I have received several private emails and calls requesting information about the funeral for Mary “Stolzi” Stolzenbach. I hope that this post reaches her many online friends at other websites and listservs.
A few years ago I was having coffee with a friend of mine who is gay. He surprised me by telling me that he opposed gay marriage vehemently. He thought that children should have a mother and a father and that gay marriage would subvert that. He also believed gay culture was all about promiscuity and sexual liberation. Marriage might kill what he loved about being gay.
Just before I left for vacation, I dashed off a short GetReligion item about that Newsweek cover story that promised to offer the inside scoop, the real story, of President George W. Bush’s tense trip to Russian for the G8 summit. I was struck that the story was completely faith-free. So I wrote:
… or at least conservatism as defined in the current American political landscape. Reporters, take note.
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.
