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We’ve established that The Washington Post Style section likes to be snarky. In the Post‘s effort to cover substantive news and issues, the snark will often get in the way. It’s almost like they’re trying to entertain us, rather then inform us. Since when does an important, serious, American news organization behave that way? Oh wait, never mind.
I wrote Why the Democrats Are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People’s Party (Encounter Books), released this October. The book touches on many subjects I intend to write about for GetReligion: the media’s treatment of secularism; the Catholic Church and Catholic social thought; American politics and government; and American mores and culture.
If you needed more evidence that not all cultural conservatives are true political conservatives, all you need to do is read the tea leaves on page one in today’s Washington Times. If you needed more evidence that many of the populist Christians from the old Democratic Bible Belt have not been fully integrated into the country clubs of the old Republican guard, you can click on that same link. Because here is the news from reporter Ralph Z. Hallow:
In celebrating its 150th anniversary, The Atlantic invited writers and artists to discuss the future of the American idea. The results, while not entirely disheartening, leave the impression of a people largely ill at ease with their nation’s future and, in a few cases, openly contemptuous of the country’s elected leaders (or, in the words of Greil Marcus, “those who presume to rule the nation”).
I was quite surprised to see the story Terry sent me from yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. Written by religion reporter K. Connie Kang, the story is about the holy day being celebrated today by millions of Lutherans, as well as Christians of various Protestant denominations: Reformation Sunday.
The Rev. Drew Phoenix of Baltimore is back in the news, as the United Methodist Church tiptoes back into the minefield of human sexuality.
The Wall Street Journal‘s opinion section has a solid review of what appears to be a solid book on the growth of evangelical, seeker-friendly megachurches. The growth of megachurches, along with the decline of the traditional mainline churches, is one of the biggest stories in religion these days, and this reviews highlights some important aspects.
The news in the Newsweek cover story about the chaos that is Pakistan is that it does not add more confusion (or much more) about the whole “moderate” Muslim mystery. In fact, there isn’t much content on the progressive side of Islam at all — which I guess tells us quite a bit about the state of things in what the newsweekly calls the “most dangerous nation” on earth.
GetReligion’s friend David Crumm sent email this week with the news that he will take a months-long leave of absence from the Detroit Free Press to develop a project called Read the Spirit. To call Read the Spirit a blog focused on religion news would be an understatement.
