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Let’s start with the classic Martin Marty quote, which is always good when talking about religion and the news. Marty has been known to say that, for many people, the word “ecumenical” seems to boil down to someone saying, “I don’t believe very much and you don’t believe very much, so we must have a lot in common.”
A long, long time ago, I was the religion writer and columnist for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. It’s a fascinating city in a beautiful region (heaven, you know) and I envy people who get to work out there.
It’s easy to treat Mother Teresa as a plaster saint, a symbol of unattainable holiness. Contrary to the example of Teresa’s life, some pampered souls (speaking for myself, at least) turn her into an escape clause from Jesus’ call to die to ourselves: “I’ll never be another Mother Teresa, so I’ll just stay where I am, thanks.” Teresa’s posture and countenance suggested a soul deeply at peace with God, and thus better able to do heroic works of compassion.
Much of my writing on CNN’s God’s Warriors has focused on the promotion for the series. Many of you readers have agreed that lumping all religious extremists together with a term that implies violence is not very good journalism. While this is very likely a decision of CNN’s marketing department, not the journalists behind the three-part series, it’s still bad journalism.
The age of the megachurch has not been kind to small congregations. The aging of the declining “seven sisters” of mainline Protestantism has not been kind to small congregations, either.
The second episode of CNN’s God’s Warriors series aired Wednesday night. I wasn’t able to follow the show as closely as on Tuesday night, so I’ll provide some general comments rather than “live blogging” the show. Please give feedback since commentary on television news programs isn’t something we do that often.
New York Times health and science reporter Benedict Carey has had more than a few interesting stories this summer. I particularly liked his write-up about how firstborn children have higher IQs. I’m a last born, for what it’s worth. For years he’s covered the case of one J. Michael Bailey, a pscyhologist at Northwestern University. Yesterday he wrote about the academic dispute involving Bailey, the former head of the psychology department:
As promised, here is a review of the first installment of CNN’s series God’s Warriors hosted by Christiane Amanpour. The topic for tonight is “God’s Jewish Warriors.” I raised the question Monday of whether the series would engage in moral equivalency by lumping together extremists (or God’s warriors) from Christianity, Judaism and Islam. As one reader asked, where are the Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism?
