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Reporter Jennifer Lebovich had a very interesting article in Sunday’s Miami Herald. She looked at the popularity of online confession websites where people anonymously post their sins or read about the sins of others. She looks at I’ve Screwed Up, GroupHug, My Secret, Daily Confession and the now-inactive Not Proud. Sexual sins are the most frequently confessed, with theft, lying and alcohol abuse following, Lebovich reports.
It has been some time since we offered any kind of update on the Anglican Wars, here and abroad. This one will be brief. I promise.
I need to flash back to a recent Washington Post, so please hang in there with me for a moment. When it comes to knowing how to embed YouTube videos, I have issues.
In his feature article “Let’s Die Together” in the May Atlantic, David Samuels does a heroic task of explaining why anonymous group suicide is becoming popular in Japan. The opening image Samuels uses, of a car in a Tokyo suburb in which five young men and one young woman died together, reminded me of a scene in P.D. James’ novel The Children of Men, in which a group of elderly people on a bus cruise hold hands and jump to their deaths from a cliff.
A very strange thing happens when journalists write books — they find themselves (hopefully) being interviewed by other journalists, often before speeches and other (hopefully) book-promoting events. Soon thereafter, they often read articles based on these interviews and find themselves exclaiming, “Wait just a (provide colorful descriptive words here) minute, I didn’t say that!”
So Vice President Dick Cheney gave a commencement speech this week at Brigham Young University. He told the gathered assembly of about 20,000 to savor second chances and be prepared for the unexpected throughout life. A small group of College Democrats and anti-war activists protested outside the venue where he spoke. Some students and faculty were upset with the choice of commencement speaker.
Part of me thought, the minute I saw this Indiana-based story, “You know, I should have young master Daniel Pulliam write about this one, seeing as how he is our authority on all things Hoosier.”
Singer Sheryl Crow has been in the news recently for her confrontation with Karl Rove and her thoughts that we all need to use less toilet paper. But it was a local story out of St. Louis that caught my attention. Religion reporter Tim Townsend writes in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about a trip the singer was making to St. Louis to raise money for a Catholic hospital that helps children with cancer.
