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This is one of the Rev. Canon Kendall Harmon’s early posts at his TitusOneNine blog, reacting to the statement released yesterday by the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops.
USA Today‘s op-ed page on Monday had a nearly full-page opinion piece on a degree offered at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary that could include a concentration in homemaking. The catch is that it’s offered exclusively to women.
This USA Today story has been in tmatt’s infamous GetReligion Guilt file for some time now, but I could not throw it away. It seems that, with the Pew Forum on such a roll, religion-beat reporters are awash in interesting poll data about religion, values, politics, etc. In other words, we are still in the aftershocks of the “values voters” and “pew gap” political earthquakes of 2000 and 2004.
What is it with my fellow GetReligionistas? It’s as if they’re completely disinterested in celebrity news. I just searched to see how we handled media coverage of the Kathy-Griffin-at-the-Emmys debacle (I was attending to other matters at the time) and see that we didn’t discuss it at all. For those who have more interesting lives, Griffin is a comedienne — and host of the 2007 gay porn awards! — who made scandalous remarks about Jesus when she accepted her Emmy for her Bravo reality series. There was so little substantive coverage of what she said that religion reporter Gary Stern hadn’t even heard about it last week:
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this interesting religion news from the Associated Press out of Malaysia: Malaysian cosmonaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor will be part of a Russian crew heading to the International Space Station next month.
It seems that some GetReligion readers are sensitive about the burning issue of whether God cares which teams win and which teams lose athletic contests and whether the prayers of the sports warriors play any role in determining the outcome of contests.
I wasn’t keeping tally before last year, but it seems there has been a noticeable uptick in mainstream media coverage of confession in Christian churches. The New York Times‘ Neela Banerjee got the ball rolling a year ago with her coverage of evangelicals launching online confessional booths for virtual confessions. The Miami Herald‘s Jennifer Lebovich had a very interesting article on the same — taking a local angle on the Florida megachurches that run some of the sites.
Nancy Gibbs has done a great job in the latest Time of discussing the agonizing details involved in the trial of Warren Jeffs, the prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints. Jeffs is being tried as an accomplice to rape on the grounds that he insisted on a girl, then 14, marrying her first cousin, despite her weeping protests that she was not ready. Jeffs’ defense attorneys argue he cannot be held accountable for what went on in the newlywed couple’s bedroom.
Associated Press religion writer Eric Gorski had a terribly interesting story out of Colorado this week. He got his hands on a private e-mail written by James Dobson. In the missive, Dobson continues his anti-Fred Thompson campaign that he began a few months ago. Here’s a snippet of the e-mail:
