We’ve been snatching up the hints, eating up the intimations and listening to mesmerizing speeches, but we are all still waiting for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. — the latest Next Big Thing in the 2008 presidential race — to tell us what he believes. No, not his position on the issues, or that he thinks Democrats should court evangelicals, but what he believes.
When siblings attack
I don’t want to let the week go without highlighting an amazing article from The Washington Post. Laura Sessions Stepp had truly amazing access to a few members of the Billy Graham family as they tried to work out a major family disagreement.
Carter's book meets the press
When a compelling book hits the stores, journalists covering the same subject can’t help but write about it. Rare and special are the books that break news with any real content, so in lieu of that, journalists seek external news angles in order to write about the book. It’s better than simply shilling for the publishing industry and writing a review, right?
Update on our 5Q+1 process
One of the goals of GetReligion is to have a two-way conversation with journalists. We do that in the posts and comments pages, of course, but we also want to try something new.
Homosexuality in Colorado megachurches, take two
This week The Denver Post‘s Eric Gorski broke a story about a Colorado megachurch pastor resigning amid allegations of homosexual conduct. The congregation in question is, like Ted Haggard’s New Life Church, down the road from where I grew up.
Wow, a new story about Christmas
If you are like me, you are reading all of the Christmas Wars stories (hey, I do have a degree in church-state studies) but you are also getting sick of them. Sick. Of. Them.
Mitt Romney's scarlet letter?
Do you hear what I hear? Conservative evangelicals are migrating their presidential hopes from Massachusetts to Kansas because of a letter Mitt Romney wrote in 1994. Or are they?
So who nixed the Seattle menorah?
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.
Don't know your Islam?
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.
