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A significant story is brewing in California as diverse groups of people with clashing social values conflict with the American promises of religious freedom and tolerance. The themes of the stories are filled with religious values and terminology, but some news articles are not quite as precise or as informative as they could be.
Jacqueline L. Salmon of The Washington Post wrote what I consider a very regrettable story about Washington Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl. Salmon’s mini-profile of Wuerl, written in preparation for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit, was shallow and unfair, the sort of story that the Archbishop detests and rightly so.
It appears that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston has a new co-cathedral, which is the kind of thing that happens when a little inland town called Houston grows into a megacity and you need a giant new sacred space to symbolize that. It’s formal name is the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart.
There’s a lot of ink spilled over how politics and religion intersect, but I wish we could see more stories about religion and commerce. It’s somewhat rare to find any religion stories on the business pages.
It appears that a major, mainstream American newspaper in a powerful American city has published an article about a Pentecostal or conservative African-American minister reacting to the controversy about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and all of those sermons that have done so much to make Sen. Barack Obama’s media life interesting in recent weeks.
With all the coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to the United States, some of it seems to just blur together. So I had to highlight a completely fresh take on the trip from the Washington Times‘ Julia Duin:
Here we go again. I do not want to revisit this topic so soon, but I have no other choice. Reporters this year are still missing a big story: the marginal status of pro-lifers in the Democratic Party.
There is a church in my neighborhood that has some bizarre combination of names like Mt. Calvary Holy Trinity Apostolic Church for Believers. My friends and I like to imagine what strange set of events led a church to have that name. Was that its original name? Was it a merger of multiple churches?
As I mentioned the other day, I haven’t been seeing a lot of mainstream coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., that spends much ink on the religion side of this story. Politics continue to rule the day (surprise, surprise).
