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It’s not a surprise, but Nashville police today classified the deaths of former NFL MVP Steve McNair and Sahel Kazemi as a murder-suicide, with Kazemi killing McNair because she suspected he was having an affair with another woman — no, not his wife — and then turning the gun she had just bought on herself.
In a week in which the homepages of the heavy media hitters have been drenched in Michael Jackson coverage, there has, believe it or not, been other news. President Obama met with Russian leaders Medvedev and Putin and negotiated agreements of import to the United States. U.S. troops died in Afghanistan implementing new U.S. strategy. And oh, by the way, Pope Benedict XVI issued a new 144-page encyclical, “Charity in Truth,” or “Caritas in Veritate.”
Before we launch into Pope Benedict XVI’s views on Michael Jackson, no, wait, the state of the global economy, I would like to note an interesting GetReligion-esque riff by the omnipresent “Diogenes” over at Off the Record blog at the conservative Catholic World News.
I came so close to being able to avoid the Michael Jackson worship service held at the Staples Center. But I caught a few minutes while feeding the world’s hungriest baby. (Seriously, I think I gave birth to Otesanek.) I caught the “We Are The World” group sing and a couple of teary eulogies.
As a rule, your GetReligionistas focus our attention on the mistakes that mainstream journalists make, or the holy holes that they leave in stories, when they fail to “get religion.” We also like to praise news organizations when they get it right, but whenever we do that readers don’t leave many comments. So, you know, we have to focus on the negative.
Independence Day weekend might not be the best time for a major story to get its due. Case in point is this fascinating New York Times story about Iranian clerics defying Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the rigged presidential election there.
There has been no shortage of news stories about the anticipated religious overtones of Michael Jackson’s funeral later today at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. (The New York Daily News reported yesterday that the family had stalemated on what religion meant most to MJ, so the service would be God free.)
Terry mentioned a report last week about Michael Jackson possibly choosing “plastination” as a grim sort of immortality. Now USA Today‘s Lifeline Live blog reports that speculation has continued about Jackson’s burial plans.
Call me a dinosaur. While I don’t blink an eye anymore at sanctuary screens and televisions in the parish house, I’m still not convinced that cell phones and computers in the sanctuary aren’t a huge distraction, another manifestation of our ADHD society gone techno-nuts.
