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Even as we speak, the journalist previously known as Mollie Ziegler — soon to be professionally known as M.Z. Hemingway — is preparing to walk down a church aisle and tie the knot. Pass the tissues, folks.
As the child of baby boomers, I found Newsweek‘s Sept. 18 piece on how baby boomers’ unprecedented religious journey changed the country revealing. Everything from Transcendental Meditation to Kabbalists to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon to Jehovah’s Witnesses to Scientology gets a mention and a bit of history. The author skillfully weaves these different religions together to form a single theme: baby boomers like their options and independence, and this includes Christian groups like Promise Keepers and the megachurch movement.
Every now and then, you get to see a reporter gently suggest that a major religious leader — take Pope Benedict XVI, example — has tried to pull a fast one. That may be what’s happening in this story earlier this week by New York Times reporter Ian Fisher about the pope’s complicated address on faith and reason, which included a highly significant illustration linked to Islam.
Did President Bush lose the evangelical vote? Is he trying to get it back? Was there ever an evangelical vote for the Texan to corral? The history of the Bush administration’s relationship with Christians is nowhere near being closed, but Bush said something rather significant Tuesday that is going to receive quite a bit of attention — first from reactionaries claiming that he is trying to bring a theocracy to America, and later from historians.
Time‘s David Van Biema and Jeff Chu have a cover story about the Prosperity Gospel this week. I can’t wait to read the whole thing, but the full article requires a subscription. So I’m writing based on CNN’s summary. The story appears to take a rather hard look at advocates of the strain of teaching that God wants people to make it rich:
My latest column for the ethics and diversity team at Poynter.org is online, if GetReligion readers want to check it out. You may, however, hear a bit of an echo since this piece called “Articles of Faith” grew out of a July post on this blog titled “Visions of another Magdalene bestseller.”
The stories in today’s papers on 9/11 memorial services provide a broad sense of the nation’s religiosity. Some are better than others in capturing this sense, but overall they are generally good at capturing a sense of the individual experiences Americans are feeling five years later. Of course, whether Americans were feeling religious Monday is another, separate matter worth examining.
Before I dash into classes today, I wanted to make a brief comment on the “Losing my religion?” survey that came out yesterday from Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion.
