One of my guilty pleasures is reading the little BeliefWatch column that runs each week near the front of Newsweek.
Born again, and again, and again ...
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Hot, hellish paraphrased Oxford quote
Have you ever been reading a news story and hit a paraphrased quotation — as opposed to a verbatim direct quote — that made you stop and mutter, “Now wait a minute! Did that person really say that? Does the reporter actually have a recording of that?”
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Knowing a beat inside and out
James Faust, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 1978, died on Friday. He also served in the high-ranking position of second counselor to President Gordon Hinckley since 1995.
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The brothers Murdoch
Michael Paulson of The Boston Globe has written one of the most poignant feature stories about the Episcopal Church’s sexuality debate that I have seen in more than 15 years of writing about the topic. In writing about two brothers who are priests, Paulson reveals their deep division on sexuality (“Bill Murdoch calls homosexual activity a sin, while Brian Murdoch calls it a gift”) and persuades the brothers to talk about how they have remained close.
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Has violence boosted devotion in Iraq?
Who would have thought that a religion story out of Iraq, or the Middle East for that matter, would have something to do with subjects unrelated to headscarves and terrorism?
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Elvis never left the church (in his heart)
As I like to mention from time to time, the professionals over at Religion News Service have a digital newsletter in which they send out a link to a “story of the week” that everyone can read if they wish. The sad truth is, it’s hard to find RNS copy online if a particular story does not run over at Beliefnet.
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Texans love God and killing killers
Well, this is certainly a pushy opening for a story on a hot-button issue, care of Reuters reporter Ed Stoddard in Dallas:
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Don't ask, don't tell, don't punish
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has ordained gay clergy for years. Since it formed out of a merger of three Lutheran church bodies in 1988, it has defrocked three clergy for violating the church body’s requirement that gay clergy abstain from sexual relationships. At the group’s national assembly last week in Chicago, a vote to permit homosexual clergy to engage in sexual relationships failed on Friday but another vote requesting that the church body avoid disciplining gay clergy who violate the celibacy policy was passed on Saturday.
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Has the GOP's evangelical candidate emerged?
Strumming his guitar to a second-place finish in the silly Iowa straw poll this past weekend, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has alerted political reporters that evangelicals aren’t to be discounted as a voting bloc in the 2008 presidential election. Reporters covering the GOP side of the campaign were all set to discount evangelicals.
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