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A few days ago we looked at Russell Shorto’s big New York Times Sunday Magazine piece on Pope Benedict XVI’s first two years in office. I mentioned a few quibbles with it but was overall very impressed. Readers shared their mixed responses.
I’m never sure what to make of news articles on Internet-based virtual worlds. This is partially since I have never participated in a virtual world, and while I play the occasion video game, the closest I’ve ever been to a “second life” on the Internet is the rare occasion that I play Halo 2. By no means am I suggesting that there are not legitimate news stories in these second Web lives. It’s just that I’m perplexed that there are enough people out there with enough time to make these genuine news stories.
All together now. Please take out your copy of The Associated Press Stylebook and turn to page 213 (in the edition currently on my desk) or look up the “religious movements” reference.
Thank you to all the readers who sent along their favorite or least favorite stories published this past weekend. There are too many to get to, but I’ll begin with The New York Times Sunday Magazine‘s cover story on Pope Benedict XVI. Good timing on that piece, as it ran on Easter Sunday. The author is Russell Shorto, who has written previously for the magazine on people who oppose contraception and people who oppose gay marriage. Both of those pieces took a liberal view not out of place in the Sunday Magazine. But Shorto is a good writer who researches his topics better than, well, the average New York Times Sunday Magazine author. Not that that’s saying much.
In a New York Times op-ed, veteran religion writer Kenneth Woodward says Mitt Romney should use a May speech at Pat Robertson’s Regent University to dispel the challenges he faces in convincing evangelical Christians to vote for him.
As a rule, I rather like articles that end with statements such as this: “Maybe Sally Quinn has gotten religion.”
A few days ago I noted that we’ve seen relatively few examples of that mainstream media Holy Week tradition of showcasing stories designed to question the work of Christ. But a reader passed along a story that’s the opposite. Associated Press religion reporter Rachel Zoll highlighted the practice:
William Frey, the Episcopal Church’s retired Bishop of Colorado, has often said his fellow Episcopalians can confuse Anglicanism’s celebrated via media with merely finding the synthesis of a thesis and an antithesis. As tmatt has mentioned before, Bishop Frey explains the impossibility of this approach by joking that, for some, the via media between a Christian and an atheist understanding of Jesus is “Jesus is occasionally Lord.”
