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Of the making of lists there is no end

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The right-of-center Daily Telegraph, Great Britain’s only remaining broadsheet, has published a list of what its editors consider the 100 most influential conservatives and liberals in the United States. The list tells us a lot about how the British see our next presidential election. It’s also a peek into how journalists across the pond understand America’s political power structure. Where do they rank the leaders of our political, business, social and, yes, religious institutions?


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A new resource: readers

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On Friday, I posted a look at an article about a West Virginia university permitting students to take off for pagan holidays. A lively discussion ensued about whether pagan should be capitalized and which religious groups should be under the pagan umbrella. And that’s just the last post I wrote. Hardly a day goes by where readers don’t add significantly to the value of this site and the content we produce. We also receive topic suggestions from readers and a good number of emails from the Godbeat journalists whose work we analyze. All this to say that GetReligion benefits greatly from our community of readers.


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Those parish school puzzles

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Are African Americans converting to Catholicism anymore? As Nicholas Lemann writes in The Promised Land, the old saying in Chicago was that when water was sprinkled on the forehead of a black baby, he or she was baptized essentially into three interlocking institutions: the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party, and the local buildings-trade union. Now one wonders what a future historian would write about the situation today.


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Parsing pagans properly

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Tom Breen is an extraordinarily good newsman in the Associated Press’ Charleston, West Virginia, bureau. He manages to write compelling national stories by focusing on local trends and events. I’ve been reading his coverage of the sad case of a 20-year-old black woman who was raped and tortured. Six white individuals have been charged in the crime. Terry highlighted his story this past summer about small-town churches struggling to keep their doors open. His thoughtful comments have enlightened many discussions here at GetReligion, too.


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Are Holy Communion rules legal?

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I wish I could remember the name of the op-ed page columnist who, a decade or so ago, wrote that she had a legal right to receive Holy Communion in the Roman Catholic Church, even though she rejected most of its teachings. No, it wasn’t Maureen Dowd.


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