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One of the most interesting stories in the 2006 Christmas Wars broke the other day in the Pacific Northwest, where the staff at the Port of Seattle hauled off all the Holiday Trees because of a conflict with a rabbi from the Chabad-Lubavitch organization about a long-delayed request to erect a giant Hanukkah menorah.
Jeff Stein, the national security editor for Congressional Quarterly, has been doing some brilliant reporting lately. Yet it’s all so simple. Ask the leaders of our nation, particularly those in positions of power in intelligence, national security and international affairs, to explain the basic differences between Sunni and Shiite Arabs.
The New York Times’ Diana Henriques filed the latest installment for her series examining, as she says, how religious organizations benefit from an increasingly accommodating government. You may recall we took a look at the first four parts in October.
If you are a steady consumer of Anglican Civil War coverage, you probably turned to this morning’s Washington, D.C., newspapers with a sense of anticipation — knowing that members in some of America’s most prosperous and historic Episcopal parishes started voting Sunday (emphasis on the word “started”) on proposals to exit the Diocese of Virginia and the progressive national church.
Somehow we missed this when we discussed coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to Turkey. We discussed this Dec. 1 article from the Los Angeles Times’ Tracy Wilkinson.
We here at GetReligion typically like just about everything the Los Angeles Times’ Stephanie Simon writes. She thrives on writing highly descriptive narratives that manage to touch on all sorts of issues, usually with religious themes. For instance, her piece on abortion still sticks in my mind and is a must read for journalists covering the subject.
May I have your attention please. According to the software we use around here, this is the 2,000th post in the nearly three years since Doug LeBlanc and I opened the cyber-doors here at GetReligion.
In case you have been on another planet for the past few days, 37-year-old Mary Cheney, the high-profile gay daughter of the Vice President Dick Cheney, is pregnant. The mainstream press accounts all note that she is expecting this child “with” Mary Poe, her partner of 15 years, but journalists are allowing the couple a rare zone of privacy and are not exploring the precise meaning of the word “with.”
I wish all newspapers had foreign correspondents. They’re such a throwback to pre-globalization, when you had to trust the eyes and ears of a lone fellow countryman in a far-off land.
