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Eve Conant does a great job in the May 7 Newsweek of tracking the spiritual struggles of Army Chaplain Roger Benimoff, who begins a second tour of duty filled with idealism (“My heart is filled with prayer and god is giving me a discerning spirit”) and returns to the United States with his faith in tatters (“We make God into what we need for the moment. I hate God”).
Yes, yes, yes, your friends at GetReligion got all the emails. We know that you saw Corey Kilgannon’s story in The New York Times about the Rev. Louis Braxton Jr. and his ministry to the “tranny” streetwalkers of Astoria, Queens.
Remember that wonderful headline that Mollie hit us with the other day: “You mean Mormons aren’t all Republicans?”
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!”
