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Last month I attended a meeting of Episcopal clergy. Most of us were middle-aged and elderly, longtime denizens of parish ministry. We spent some time talking about the Scriptures for that Sunday. Then I asked them what they thought of the Rev. Kevin G. Thew Forrester (got to be Episcopalian, with that name), a controversial bishop candidate in the Diocese of Northern Michigan.
A few years ago, Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll sent a memo to all section editors expressing his concern that the paper had covered a story about abortion in a remarkably one-sided manner:
As several readers have written to let us know, this USA Today mini-package seemed like a great idea. I mean, GetReligion readers ought to want to dig into a feature that runs under the headline: “A window into the faith of religion reporters.”
When popular films portray Christians well — not as plaster saints or as hypocrites with bulging eyes — they can achieve a near-transcendence. I think of the late great Horton Foote’s screenplays for Tender Mercies or The Trip to Bountiful, or the the humanity that director Paul Thomas Anderson gave to a Christian police officer in Magnolia.
Last Sunday, late-term abortion doctor George Tiller was gunned down in the foyer of his Lutheran church, where he served as an usher. As anyone with even a cursory understanding of Lutheranism in America could surmise, that church was a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Of the various Lutheran church bodies in America, the ELCA is the most mainline and has the most supportive position on legalized abortion.
Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas, badly misremembering Reagan’s famous Boys of Pointe du Hoc speech, and opining about President Barack Obama:
