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Continuing the Useem dialogue

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I have been putting off posting the second part of my dialogue (click here for earlier post) with freelance journalist Andrea Useem for two simple reasons: (1) I was out of town for a week, attempting to survive four days of traffic-challenged driving in greater Los Angeles and (2) we normally fill our 5Q+1 interviews with hyperlinks to all of the publications, schools, think tanks, etc., linked to the journalist’s career and, in this case, Useem has just been too busy for me to look up all of those links.


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Overplaying the religion angle

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Last week, the president of The College of William & Mary resigned abruptly after he found out his contract wasn’t going to be renewed later this year. President Gene Nichol, a former administrator at my alma mater, had been in the news for a couple of decisions he made. One was removing a cross from the campus’ historic Wren Chapel. Another was permitting a traveling show of sex workers to visit the campus. William & Mary is a public university of the Commonwealth of Virginia, it should be noted.


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How did the Butler do it?

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In the 1963 film “The Great Escape,” it’s obvious how the Allied prisoners escaped from a German prisoner camp: they built an underground tunnel. In a Washington Post story of the same name, it’s not at all clear how as a teenager NBA All-Star Caron Butler escaped from his drug-infested neighborhood.


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Part. Of. The. Story. In. Kosovo.

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Main Entry: bal-kan-ize …Inflected Form(s): bal-kan-ized; bal-kan-iz-ing … Etymology: Balkan Peninsula … 1: to break up (as a region or group) into smaller and often hostile units


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Ignoring the faith factor

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My local congressional district has a special election in a couple of weeks to fill the House seat vacated by the late Rep. Julia Carson, D-Ind. You wouldn’t know it from reading our local newspaper The Indianapolis Star, but the Democratic candidate for the seat, Carson’s grandson Andre Carson, could become the nation’s second Muslim member of Congress.


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Strange style twist of the day

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The Los Angeles Times has a pretty off-the-rack news feature in print today about the Rev. Mike Huckabee and his ongoing “miracles happen” campaign for president, vice president, syndicated talk-show host, Rolling Stones bass player or whatever.


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The divide heads north

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Much of the mainstream media coverage of the controversies in the Anglican Communion have focused on The Episcopal Church. Canada’s Globe and Mail looked at how things are playing out in another part of North America. Robert Matas wrote a story on Friday about a parish in Vancouver deciding to align with Anglicans in South America. He took the novel and welcome angle of determining why the parish had made its decision. For his lede, he told readers about the Bible study that parishioners at St. John’s Shaughnessy Church had taken part in prior to voting to request oversight from Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Anglican Province of Southern Cone:


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Answers after the bloodshed?

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Your GetReligionistas have, from time to time, asked editors and reporters to ask the “Why?” question in that old journalistic sequence, “who, what, when, where, why and how.” That question can be pretty hard — hellish even — in some stories linked to tragedy and disaster.


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How faithful are the Democrats?

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Amy Sullivan of Time wrote a story about recent efforts by Democratic officials to reach out to religious voters. Her story included some fascinating details about how John Kerry’s campaign bungled its chance to appeal to the same, such as this one:


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